


We’ll Take a Cup of Kindness Yet

by Meatball42



Series: Rare Pairs [56]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Cathartic Cooking, Christmas, F/M, Fluff, Multi, Southern Comfort, Stress Baking, Traditions, but really it's
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-22
Updated: 2018-01-22
Packaged: 2019-03-08 06:26:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,796
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13452429
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Meatball42/pseuds/Meatball42
Summary: The evolution of Christmas traditions.





	We’ll Take a Cup of Kindness Yet

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kiss_me_cassie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kiss_me_cassie/gifts).



> For the prompts:  
> 1\. Holidays as the years progress and how they have changed and the way they celebrate has changed
> 
> 2\. OT3 with Bucky, with the assumption that Bucky and Natasha knew each other in the Red Room and how he now fits into the relationship she's built with Clint

 

When Clint was a kid he loved Christmas. At school, he got to sing carols and eat cookies shaped like trees, and winter meant playing in the snow with the other kids in the neighborhood. They were never rich enough to have that many presents, but Clint’s mom cooked turkey or ham and everyone opened a present on Christmas Eve.

When Clint was eight, he and his brother were taken into foster care, and he never really cared about Christmas after that.

 

* * *

 

Clint’s normal holiday celebration consisted of crashing on his couch with a bottle of Southern Comfort and treating himself to whatever looked good on payperview, but this year was going to be different. This year was going to be different because there was a new agent defected from the KGB, and she didn’t have any holiday plans, or anyone to celebrate with, and even though Clint didn’t know if she even celebrated Christmas- he’d asked if she cared or had some Russian holiday instead, and she only smirked at him, which was typical- he’d told her to come over to his place on the 24th. He even said he’d cook, for all that it had elicited a disbelieving eyebrow-raise.

He’d had a plan, really, truly- he bought the ingredients for Christmas dinner well in advance, even sketched out a cooking time schedule on the back of the grocery receipt.

The downfall lay in, well, Clint really didn’t know how to cook.

Natasha knocked while Clint was trying to figure out what happened to his biscuits to make them look… like that. She’d seemed perfectly at home in his apartment- too perfectly at home, the same way she did at SHIELD and anywhere he ever saw her through his scope, watching her six. She relaxed somewhat while she helped him salvage the meal.

The chicken came out dry. The greens came out wet. The mashed potatoes were too salty and not buttery like the hazy memories he had of home. Clint apologized glumly even as Natasha politely cleared half of her plate.

But.

Natasha brought a bottle of wine and cannoli from a bakery. Clint still had the bottle of Southern Comfort he’d been planning on drinking, and he learned that it went down better when shared. They watched Christmas movies Natasha had never seen- “Never been subjected to!” she corrected, cringing at 70s animation- on public access, and they mocked and drank until it was Christmas Day.

Natasha insisted she could make it home, but Clint said he had a spare room, injecting a little bit of loneliness into his tone- hey, Natasha wasn’t the only one who could act. Either she’d had too much to drink to notice the manipulation (unlikely) or she decided to humor him, but either way she agreed to stay the night at his place.

They opened present in pajamas- Clint in sweats and Natasha in a long t-shirt of Clint’s and her jeans unbuttoned.

(Years later Natasha would claim she could not possibly feel the need to stand on ceremony in someone’s home after listening to them drunkenly sing along with Frosty the Snowman. Clint would maintain that this was the true start of a beautiful friendship and also the first and only time someone had gotten Natasha drunk and survived to tell of the experience.)

Having been acquainted for just under two months, their presents sucked. Clint got Natasha a bottle of perfume, which she wore occasionally when she knew she would be seeing him, and then threw out once they got to know each other better. Natasha got Clint a tie, which he used once to keep his heavy front door from shutting while he carried a new sofa inside, and then lost in a subsequent move, unworn.

The next year they ordered Chinese, and the presents were better, but the rest stayed pretty much the same.

 

* * *

 

The first Christmas in Avengers Tower was a mess of loud and conflicting personalities, unexpected food allergies, and surprise guests. The horrors proceeded as follows:

  1. Tony Stark declared a Christmas party to be attended by all Avengers, plus ones, and various ‘Friends of the Avengers’. This group included the family that ran the shawarma shop where they’d eaten after their first mission together and somehow failed to include their SHIELD liaison.
  2. Everyone received a memo sent from Tony’s account at 4:47am on December 22nd announcing that the party would be an ugly sweater party.
  3. When the party commenced, everyone showed up in an ugly sweater except for Tony and Pepper, who showed up in formalwear. Amidst a minor uproar, Thor’s girlfriend’s intern admitted to faking the memo, and showed off her Twitter, where photos of the sweater-clad Avengers were already trending.
  4. Tony tried to hire the intern for her hacking skills, which annoyed Thor’s girlfriend, which annoyed Thor, and everything got very loud for a while until Bruce ate a canape and turned bright red, scrabbling at his throat, and then purple, and then green.
  5. A STRIKE team flew in to assist in securing the premises, and Tony and Steve ended up in a shouting match with each other, Agent Hill, and Directory Fury while Thor, Clint and Natasha corralled the Hulk and Pepper authorized a medevac from the Tower’s landing strip for two of the STRIKE team who’d gotten in Hulk’s way.
  6. Once Hulk fell asleep in the remains of Christmas dinner and any and all SHIELD personnel minus current Avengers were ejected from the Tower, JARVIS ordered Chinese on Natasha’s suggestion, and everyone ate a slightly awkward dinner in a formal conference room on Stark Industries’ executive floor.
  7. Clint and Natasha retired to her suite, guzzled their traditional Southern Comfort, opened a present each, and passed out.
  8. The next day, Bruce got back a rush allergen test which informed him he was allergic to the mold the $400/lb designer cheese was made from.
  9. Clint threw up a lot, and insisted it was from the cheese, not his hangover.



 

* * *

 

Despite what everyone thought, Strike Team Delta had never had a romantic relationship. That didn’t change until after they’d left the organization that partnered them, and not until said organization was revealed to be a front for homegrown Nazi terrorists planning to shoot half the country from ships whose security protocols they’d both helped design.

Not much changed, except they slept in the same bed, and when Clint bought Natasha lingerie for Christmas she humored him and put it on before demanding her real present.

 

* * *

 

Natasha and Clint were set in their ways of half-assing the holidays. James was determined to change that.

For eight months, the former assassin stayed in their spare bedroom, and in this case ‘stayed in’ meant pretty much always. He left the room for therapy appointments, one-sided conversations with Steve, and meals. Natasha was the only person he spoke to voluntarily, always in Russian. Steve called him Bucky, Natasha called him James, and the man himself never expressed a preference. Natasha said he didn’t think it mattered, which Clint turned over in his mind for a bit before it got too close and he had to stop.

When Natasha told Clint that James said he remembered her, loved her, Clint thought about that for a while, too. He remembered the way Natasha carefully didn’t let herself rely on anyone for years after defecting. He remembered ten foster placements in ten years and what he would’ve given for a safe place where people cared about him. He thought about how Bruce was actually smiling lately, for-real smiles, not just self-deprecating and wry and carefully not bitter, and how he teased Tony back sometimes.

And he thought that he’d never once told Natasha what she could or couldn’t do, never even considered it.

“Okay, cool,” he eventually told her, shrugging and taking apart a mechanical pencil over the kitchen island. “Just no, you know. Hanky panky when I’m around, right?”

Natasha gave him a disdainful look, then kissed his cheek softly from behind when he went for a cup of coffee.

Four months later he saw them kiss on the back porch from inside the kitchen. James’ fingers barely brushed Natasha’s sides, and she held his chin in one hand, touched his chest with the other. Clint had to swallow a lump in his throat, suddenly deeply grateful that they’d decided to have James stay with them.

A month after that, after an increasing number of ‘accidental’ lingering touches on both sides, James took Clint’s hand while they watched hockey on the couch. When Natasha got home she found them wrapped up together in a blanket, fast asleep. They woke up when her phone’s shutter sound went off and chased her around the house, shrieking threats, only managing to coordinate and corner her after the picture had been posted to the Avengers’ group chat and replies started pouring in.

By December, James was speaking English with Steve, which made Steve look like the sun coming out from behind clouds. He was also leaving the house once in awhile, and on a trip to the grocery store he frowned at Clint’s basket.

“No turkey?”

Clint explained his and Natasha’s tradition of Chinese for Christmas dinner and James got very wide- and sad-eyed, almost like Steve’s expressions were rubbing off on him. He took the basket from Clint and piled it high with all sorts of thing Clint had never bought, like Allspice and chives and russet potatoes.

James cooked. While he cooked, he smiled, and told stories about helping his mother prepare ham and cranberry sauce, turnips and winter-squash, while little girls scurried around underfoot ‘helping’. He put the radio on and made Clint peel potatoes and Natasha shuck corn. He sang along to Christmas songs, and Clint had to take a few quiet deep breaths so he wouldn’t tear up. Natasha would never, but he did catch her smiling at James in a way Clint had never once seen through a scope.

Christmas Eve that year was Clint, Natasha, James, Steve, and Sharon Carter squeezing their dinner plates around a massive spread of dishes on a table originally chosen for two people to eat microwaved pizza and sort mail on. James grinned the whole time and accepted numerous compliments for his cooking skills. Steve and Sharon brought an apple pie Sharon had baked, though she conceded that Steve had helped slice the apples. James ribbed Steve for being hopeless in the kitchen, and Steve had to clear his throat a few times before giving James a watery smile.

They all opened one gift that night, before Steve and Sharon left. Clint, Natasha and James split a bottle of Southern Comfort between them, watching old Christmas movies on public access until it was Christmas Day.


End file.
